posted                      

quote:

---

Feraon and the Negroes (Feraon et les nègres, nègres likely not being originally a slur in Kabyle text)


At this time, was living a man called Feraon or Feraun. Feraon ate the content of a big jar, "akufi", full of barley, but was still hungry. He ate the content of another "Akufi" full of corn but was still not satisfied. After he ate everything that other people usually eat, his oesophagus was finally full, but the food he had swallowed had not reached his stomach. So he ate some black beans and enjoyed it. He ate a large number of them with voracity. He ate it with such a voracity that he was not even chewing the beans, but was swallowing them. When he defecated, after digesting, the beans appeared to be intact. On the floor, the non-digested beans became the negroes. And this is that way Feraon gave birth to African negroes, who nowadays still like eating black beans, that they like over any other food. When they can have some, the do not pay attention to couscous and meat to enjoy eating black beans.

After he ate that much, Feraon went thirsty. He went to look out for water and found out a source. He bent down and started drinking. While he just had started drinking, the spring dried up, but he was still thirsty. He went to another source and bent down to drink. Had he just started drinked that the spring had dried up already.

Feraon went a bit farer, still being thirsty. He finally arrived at a big River. He bent down and drank. He drank again and again, until he stopped being thirsty. The River's flow had not decreased a little bit though. The river was still deeply flowing. Feraon became angry towards it, because the flow had not decreased, despite had drunk a lot of water. He said: "Could this river be stronger than me"?

He took some big clods of earth and throwed them into the river to fill it in. Yet the water was disolving the clods and the river was turning into mud. The water thus turned all brownish and muddy.

People living on the banks of the river started to complain: "This Feraon is soiling and altering our water! He drank and soiled the water!". But Feraon told himself: "So this river wants to be stronger than me! It takes away all the earth I am throwing in it. Then I will burn it to show that I am stronger than it!". Feraon started a great fire laying on entire forests of trees. There were not a single tree in the area that was still standing. He throwed them all into the fire, then took them away in flames and threw them into the river. Because of the heat, water was starting to evaporate, until it had almost totally vanished. The few water remaining then disappeared because of the sun. Thus, Feraon had destroyed the forests, the scrubs and the streams because he did not want the river to be stronger than him.
This is why the Negroes still live into the desert where one often has to walk for fourteen days to find a spring and two months to find a village. This is also why the Negroes still live on hot sand with no shadow of the day. The sun is very close, being only located one cubit above of their heads. In Sudan, there still exists another longer measurement unit called "enefs g iGil" that represents the length of a stretched arm, from armpit to fingers, the arm being stretched towards the sky, because the Negroes actually are the descendants of Feraon.

---

Posts: 307 | Registered: Oct 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Please call me MIDOGBE:

I also checked Kamal Naït-Zerrad 's Tamazic roots dictionary (K. Naït-Zerrad (2002),
Dictionnaire des racines berbères : formes attestées. III, Paris ; Louvain : Peeters) to see if the root F-R-N had a native meaning that could be related to Feraon's name. I found only two of them, the first one being semantically linked with ovens (a borrowing from Latin furnus "oven") and the second being linked with "choice, election, elite, sorting, weeding, etc.). While the latter could be related the Feraon, as the elected one, the elite, I don't think of it as definite because of the large semantic variation of the realizations of the root.

---

quote:

---

The implications for the equation Pharaoh= Feraon, in my opinion, is that despite the conception of "Black Africans" as being excrements, Kabyle traditions have Black Africans as descendants of Kemet. I guess they got it from the Ham/Noah myth via Islam, which would be logical, since the alledged Kabyle variant of the name of Pharaoh (with a final "n" is only found in Arabic (via Syriac) to my knowledge).

---

Posts: 7516 | From: Somewhere on Earth | Registered: Jan 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Please call me MIDOGBE:
^
Thank you very much for your response.


From (L. Frobenius (1995), Contes Kabyles,
Tome I: Sagesse, Aix-en-Provence : Edisud, p.78-79)

quote:

---

Feraon and the Negroes (Feraon et les nègres, nègres likely not being originally a slur in Kabyle text)


At this time, was living a man called Feraon or Feraun. Feraon ate the content of a big jar, "akufi", full of barley, but was still hungry. He ate the content of another "Akufi" full of corn but was still not satisfied. After he ate everything that other people usually eat, his oesophagus was finally full, but the food he had swallowed had not reached his stomach. So he ate some black beans and enjoyed it. He ate a large number of them with voracity. He ate it with such a voracity that he was not even chewing the beans, but was swallowing them. When he defecated, after digesting, the beans appeared to be intact. On the floor, the non-digested beans became the negroes. And this is that way Feraon gave birth to African negroes, who nowadays still like eating black beans, that they like over any other food. When they can have some, the do not pay attention to couscous and meat to enjoy eating black beans.

After he ate that much, Feraon went thirsty. He went to look out for water and found out a source. He bent down and started drinking. While he just had started drinking, the spring dried up, but he was still thirsty. He went to another source and bent down to drink. Had he just started drinked that the spring had dried up already.

Feraon went a bit farer, still being thirsty. He finally arrived at a big River. He bent down and drank. He drank again and again, until he stopped being thirsty. The River's flow had not decreased a little bit though. The river was still deeply flowing. Feraon became angry towards it, because the flow had not decreased, despite had drunk a lot of water. He said: "Could this river be stronger than me"?

He took some big clods of earth and throwed them into the river to fill it in. Yet the water was disolving the clods and the river was turning into mud. The water thus turned all brownish and muddy.

People living on the banks of the river started to complain: "This Feraon is soiling and altering our water! He drank and soiled the water!". But Feraon told himself: "So this river wants to be stronger than me! It takes away all the earth I am throwing in it. Then I will burn it to show that I am stronger than it!". Feraon started a great fire laying on entire forests of trees. There were not a single tree in the area that was still standing. He throwed them all into the fire, then took them away in flames and threw them into the river. Because of the heat, water was starting to evaporate, until it had almost totally vanished. The few water remaining then disappeared because of the sun. Thus, Feraon had destroyed the forests, the scrubs and the streams because he did not want the river to be stronger than him.
This is why the Negroes still live into the desert where one often has to walk for fourteen days to find a spring and two months to find a village. This is also why the Negroes still live on hot sand with no shadow of the day. The sun is very close, being only located one cubit above of their heads. In Sudan, there still exists another longer measurement unit called "enefs g iGil" that represents the length of a stretched arm, from armpit to fingers, the arm being stretched towards the sky, because the Negroes actually are the descendants of Feraon.

---

OK, I did not try to translate to start some "racial" polemics and I don't know if it has already been dealt with in the past, but this text sounded very interesting to me.

First of all, I asked a couple of laymen Kabyle friends of mine who told me that they did not know about a tale character named Feraon (they don't know about Kabyle tales that much, actually), but that the word meant "Pharaoh". That seems to be confirmed by the fact that it is homophone with Arabic (Bible & Qur'an) Fir'awn "Pharaoh" and that another tale I'm in the process of translating entitled "Feraon and the Death Angel or the origin of the Seven Seas" ("Feraon et l'Ange de la Mort ou l'origine des sept mers", pp. 80-85 of the same book) depicts a grown up Feraon as the most powerful ruler Earth has ever known, and ending dying drowned like Pharaoh in the Bible.

I also checked Kamal Naït-Zerrad 's Tamazic roots dictionary (K. Naït-Zerrad (2002),
Dictionnaire des racines berbères : formes attestées. III, Paris ; Louvain : Peeters) to see if the root F-R-N had a native meaning that could be related to Feraon's name. I found only two of them, the first one being semantically linked with ovens (a borrowing from Latin furnus "oven") and the second being linked with "choice, election, elite, sorting, weeding, etc.). While the latter could be related the Feraon, as the elected one, the elite, I don't think of it as definite because of the large semantic variation of the realizations of the root.

Not that in the text, there seems to be established "truths" in Kabyle society that are justified by some elements of the tale. Those "truths" are always preceeded by explications then anaphoric explicative subordination constructions ("because", "why", and the like).

"And this is that way Feraon gave birth to African negroes who nowadays still like eating black beans, that they like over any other food. When they can have some, the do not pay attention to couscous and meat to enjoy eating black beans."
"This is why the Negroes still live into the desert where one often has to walk for fourteen days to find a spring and two months to find a village."
"This is also why the Negroes still live on hot sand with no shadow of the day."

"In Sudan, there still exists another longer measurement unit called "enefs g iGil" that represents the length of a stretched arm, from armpit to fingers, the arm being stretched towards the sky, because the Negroes actually are the descendants of Feraon."

The implications for the equation Pharaoh= Feraon, in my opinion, is that despite the conception of "Black Africans" as being excrements, Kabyle traditions have Black Africans as descendants of Kemet. I guess they got it from the Ham/Noah myth via Islam, which would be logical, since the alledged Kabyle variant of the name of Pharaoh (with a final "n" is only found in Arabic (via Syriac) to my knowledge). It could either reflect knowledge of direct migrations from Kemet to West Africa like within Diop and Lam's perspective, or simply confirm that Kemetians were "Black Africans" dissimilar to Kabyles and similar to their Southern neighbours. This opinion being quite different from that of many Amazigh activists nowadays.

What do you guys think?

---

Posts: 307 | Registered: Oct 2005  |  IP: Logged |